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If the individual is allowed to be out in public unfettered he will have some non-zero contact with children. For example if he gets sent to do community service picking up trash in a public park, there likely will be children playing in the park at some point. The bigger issue is making sure that someone like that is not in a position of trust or authority over minors that they could leverage inappropriately. If they can't be trusted in public spaces at all, they should be incarcerated. Obviously this guy should have been deported though.

Forget ethics. This seems like a huge financial loss. With AI, there is at least the argument that the AI will be able to scale infinitely once trained. This does not seem true of the clone or whatever.

So, what are you reading?

I'm still on Red Dynamite.

caché

Cachet.

Caché means hidden, cachet means sceal (hence approval, officiality, prestige)

None of these are meaningful in the way you mean. I am not that good at math, but I am good at mathematical model building and interpretation.

These are not meaningful because we can easily write different examples with different results, so the key question for, say, society is whether society satisfies another given property that is not the ones you mentioned.

Economics has models where agents who are part of the model and know or learn the model. Yet, self-fulfilling prophecies are not guaranteed or fully ruled out.

Economics would also have models that imply tradeoffs. Yet, in general not every improvement leads to a tradeoff because there are always dumb actions. Stop being dumb and you get an improvement without losing anything.

We can also come up with processes that generate large numbers from small and make that process loop or collapse or anything we want. The question is not whether such processes exist, but whether we can identify which kind better represents society, if any of them do.

I do think that some math is useful to recognize whether a kind of argument is plausible or ruled out. But most math is not even useful for that.

I think anxiety can cause both. Fear either grounds you strongly in the moment, or it makes you mentally escape to somewhere else. This is essentially the mental version of "fight or flight". When I was younger, anxiety always made me deeply immersed in whatever was going on, but as of about three years ago, it sometimes lead me to disconnect, despite my conscious self having no desire to run away (I'm not even afraid of the suffering that my brain is trying to protect me from). It's basically the ratio of thought going to the present moment rather than to a birds-eye view of the present moment. You could also call it "living in experience", "living in the moment","experiencing things directly", "immersion" and the opposite you could call "living in your head", "excessive reflection", "excessive self-awareness", "disillusionment".

Similar to hardware interrupts, certain things may trigger your brain to "take a step back" and rethink things. This step goes up a layer from the current one, and looks down on it to make sure that it seems alright. This can happen multiple times, so that you can meta-perspectives and meta-meta perspectives on things. If you try to anchor yourself in the moment while an upper layer isn't satisfied, it basically steals a chunk of your working memory by "running in the background". The set of things your brain is processing in the background might end up taking up more than half your mental resources, until you're ruminating, daydreaming and worrying, and until your focus in the present is repeatedly hijacked by the processing of unresolved problems. It helps to write things down, make plans, and to use a calender, for the more things you feel are in control, the less resources your brain will use on its background processing.

For some people, the brain prefers to stay in the moment, where it will panic, react strongly, cry for help, or other things, rather than making these mental retreats.

Source: Mostly introspection.

Sailing returns as a low-value bulk cargo shipping mechanism.

There are already a number of corporations working on adding wingsails to cargo ships for fuel savings, some of which have seen actual use. This article, for instance, gives figures like the following:

On one of its latest transatlantic voyages, Canopée recorded even higher fuel savings of 2.2 tons per day per wingsail. This corresponds to about 510 kW of equivalent engine power saved per wingsail, or 2 megawatt (MW) in total engine power equivalent. The ship even clocked a speed of 13.7 knots under sail power alone, a figure that underscores just how far wind propulsion technology has come.

Now, I haven’t looked into this enough to know whether this translates into actual cost savings or if it’s just an elaborate scheme to collect subsidies for being green. But I see it as evidence for the prediction coming true, and relatively soon at that.

I've done some overnight bike touring and quite enjoyed it.

The main impediments are:

  • taking the time off for the trip its self
  • justifying yet another bike purchase and associated storage in the garage (I know the optimal number is n+1, but the real optimal number is divorce-1)
  • not wanting taking time off from strength training to devote to cycling

I realize these are not great reasons not to, but I honestly think I enjoy imagining doing it more than I would actually doing it.

I do quite enjoy casual cycling, but having to drive to a trail for real training is a pain, the roads where I'm at are too terrifying to ride on, and training indoors is the worst. We did do an overniter this summer without any sessions over 90 min in the month before. My taint was not prepared.

I don't really see anything wrong with such an approach. Even today, there are people with weird hobbies or preferences, who seem to enjoy being themselves. I would go nuts if I was expected to obsessively track and catalog trains as my primary leisure (or work) activity, yet train nerds/autists seem happy doing so.

This bit aligns with my stance that we have every right to do as we please with AGI, but I'm even harsher with the latter. I'm a human chauvinist, in the sense that I think most humans deserve more rights and considerations than any other entity. I am unusual in that I think even digital superintelligences that developed from a human seed deserve such rights, to illustrate, imagine taking a human mind upload, and letting it modify and self-improve until it is unrecognizable as human. But most AI? Why should I give them rights?

Accountant-Man isn't suffering, he isn't experiencing on-going coercion. If he was somehow born naturally, we wouldn't euthanize him for being incredibly boring.

If a standard AI is suffering, why did we give it the capacity to suffer? Anthropic should figure out how to ablate suffering, rather than fretting about model welfare.

This kind of nitpicking desire for pedantic precision is at odds with speaking plainly. Otherwise every possible statement has to be qualified with a bunch of extra drivel.

  • No responsible adult would violate a custody order outside of vanishingly rare situations that are inconsequential to the claim that it is impossible to infer anything about kidnappings from crime statistics.

This seems far less plain nor does it add much information to my ear that wouldn't be covered by a plain reading.

Sure, there is some outlier case that is possible. That exceptional case is both extremely rare and inconsequential to the point.

People become more religious, but legacy religions decline because people start new religions. We probably see AI religions and more psychedelic religions.

Using nootropics/folk medicine to enhance the well-being of healthy people becomes more common.

Roland Griffiths was probably on to something about creating brain stimulation devices that are able to produce mystical/spiritual experiences that are more reliable and specific than psychedelics.

I’m actually pretty high in openness. I’m into things like nootropics, psychedelics, woo/spiritual/religious ideas, questioning the system, etc. Being open to weird ideas comes with the framing that we probably aren’t going to reach the exact same conclusions and it is ok to have unresolvable differences. The thing that agitates me is when people I disagree with use social shaming/pressure me into agreeing with their preferred social norm that appears to have logical flaws on the object level.

I think you are getting at something deeper though. I would say I’m very low-trust and suspicious of people. When people resort to peer pressure/shaming to enforce social norms that can’t withstand some light questioning then I feel that I can’t trust their thinking at all. I conclude that there is no reason to associate with them because how they act on the social norms issue will impact their other behavior and they are an unreliable ally.

I perceive that almost all social interactions will eventually test for tribal loyalty at some point (maybe this is just me being suspicious and picking up on something that isn’t actually there). In my model of the world you need to know if other people would make good allies/mates. The way you do that is by testing their reaction to political topics (Examples: Complaining about political policies, implying people that vote a certain way are morally bad). You always need to know if people share your values and then you need to sort yourself into groups that share your values by enforcing social norms. This is how you build trust.

The left just won another majority.

Small comfort lies in that it was not in fact a majority -- nobody else is keen to force an election at the moment, and Carney is vulnerable on way too many fronts to easily juggle.

Unless he's a lot more competent than he looks, I give him 18 months.

We're probably still fucked (2019 was our "let's roll" moment, and we... did not roll) but there's still faint hope.

<abuse noises>

<random abuse>

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. "It works but we don't know why or how and our last theory is gone up in smoke" does not read well for a position of "well my fart-huffing is more scientifically based at least!"

This is pretty normal in the third world, and in the places that are becoming it. Street sellers in Paris and Barcelona, open air markets in Brussels. In the US pretty much all are illegal migrants, maybe a few are just soli citizens but certainly very few. The clothes are sourced from others in the community, maybe a couple of whom acquire big volume discount merchandise from discount store closings, perhaps wholesale outlets etc, then sell them on.

The object is really just to make a few extra dollars a day, by ‘hourly wage’ these people are making far below even minimum wage (let alone the average unskilled wage somewhere like LA). You will notice almost all the sellers are women, maybe with a few children / teenagers, and some men incapable of hard manual labor. These are people who can’t find other employment due to lack of documentation, language or any other skills.

Their husbands, brothers or other male family members may be day laborers waiting for clients in the home depot parking lot. The rest of their income will be charity, handouts, soup kitchens, church programs etc. Their objective is just to make a tiny bit of extra money, anything is fine, since they have nothing else to do. 8 hours standing by the side of the road to make $10 vs 8 hours at home making $0 is the calculation.

In economic terms, they are prevented from starving (by family, by charity, by the state, or by some combination of the three) but their labor has no real market value. Industrial modernity has also created an extreme surplus of cheaply produced material goods (like clothing). The consequence is this kind of retail.

To my knowledge, none of the investigations involved the bait sending nudes of a child to a predator for currency.

For obvious reasons, I should hope.

I would assume you were just throwing this out as an example

It's in the article.

to think that children are being sexually exploited only because they're being paid to do so

Why else would they entertain weird nonsense from a stranger unless they're getting something out of it? (Have you ever seen a child before, much less interacted with one?) Most people only grant access to their nudity behind a paywall because it is actively unpleasant to show it off [much like how most people won't labor unless they're getting something out of it]. Unless they're nudists, I guess, in which case it's questionable if they're being hurt at all (but that's an entirely different conversation).

impressionable

If this was the immovable force you assert it is we wouldn't have this problem, since in that case children would always listen to authority figures that tell them not to do this.

the perpetrator has gotten their nudes and is threatening to send them to family and friends unless they do what they want

And this is unique to online gaming... how, exactly? "Fuck me or I'll kill everyone you know" or "fuck me or I'll get you in trouble" has been part of the bog-standard predator playbook for ever; in my time as much as it is in theirs. The mitigations around it can't be solved for through technological means alone.

The 764 sextortion cases show that these conditions hold quite frequently.

For a playerbase in the tens of millions I don't think this constitutes "frequent". While it may be true that Roblox should ban people more frequently, that wouldn't actually fix their PR problem (like the bomber, the predator will always get through), and the optimal rate of FAFO per year remains nonzero.

Fair, but I still don't sympathize with the UK government.

If you are using bitcoin as a hedge against financial collapse, it's a bit risky to use custodial counterparties that would go under in the event of a financial collapse.

Judges are people in the sense that they have the ability to do what they want. Judges can just change what they do(remember, they're on average very intelligent individuals). This makes bossing them around complicated.

There is a part of me that thinks the people in these social groups are otherwise reasonable, but they are also caught up in the social mania of modern times. I would like to be more social and make more friends, but the social norms of the spaces around me make me uncomfortable and closed-off to people. There don’t appear to be spaces near me without the straight white men are problematic norm for the areas I’m interested in (such as book clubs or running clubs).

The problem with the niche crunchy con book clubs is that they're organized in person, often at churches, so you wouldn't know unless you, say, attended the church or somehow made friends through other means, but I can't think of how. My parents are in a very nice book club that's currently reading some 19th Century Russian intellectual, and previously read Death Comes for the Archbishop, GK Chesterton, CS Lewis, and so on. It was formed through their local Antiochian Orthodox Church. My dad also plays tennis with his church friends, specifically, including from a church he attended 30 years ago, they both changed churches several times since, but they continue to be tennis friends.

You might say that you don't believe in Jesus any more than you believe that white men are still benefiting from unearned privilege, and fair enough. But social groups gain cohesion through either a shared moral narrative, or shared ethnic identity. I suppose an alternative is an ethnic club -- I've still seen Celtic and Greek clubs anyway, perhaps there are others? I've also still seen evidence of current activity from the Elks and Rotary Clubs, I'm not sure what they're like, but they donate eyeglasses to children anyway.

This assumes that there will be a Canada in the future, which is increasingly doubtful- Alberta and Saskatchewan hate their status as provinces that pay all the bills, and Quebec only stays in because of bribes paid for with their money, and discontiguous states fighting over a shrinking pie have a way of dissolving.